SJWs Go After Families, Cuz They’re Unfair May 26, 2016
Posted by geoff in News.trackback
Ran across this gem on the internet:
I had done some work on social mobility and the evidence is overwhelmingly that the reason why children born to different families have very different chances in life is because of what happens in those families.
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One way philosophers might think about solving the social justice problem would be by simply abolishing the family. If the family is this source of unfairness in society then it looks plausible to think that if we abolished the family there would be a more level playing field.
Before you get too incensed (though you will eventually regardless, because, well, read on), I should point out that this is just his philosophical starting point – he only sort of advocates abolishing the family. That is, having a family is fine, but it shouldn’t be a traditional nuclear family consisting of your biological kin:
‘It’s true that in the societies in which we live, biological origins do tend to form an important part of people’s identities, but that is largely a social and cultural construction. So you could imagine societies in which the parent-child relationship could go really well even without there being this biological link.’
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‘Politicians love to talk about family values, but meanwhile the family is in flux and so we wanted to go back to philosophical basics to work out what are families for and what’s so great about them and then we can start to figure out whether it matters whether you have two parents or three or one, or whether they’re heterosexual etcetera.’
So what’s the most important distinguishing characteristic of this new family structure (composed of people who aren’t related to you)? Seems to be strenuously avoiding giving your child any kind of competitive advantage.
‘What we realised we needed was a way of thinking about what it was we wanted to allow parents to do for their children, and what it was that we didn’t need to allow parents to do for their children, if allowing those activities would create unfairnesses for other people’s children’.
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‘We could prevent elite private schooling without any real hit to healthy family relationships, whereas if we say that you can’t read bedtime stories to your kids because it’s not fair that some kids get them and others don’t, then that would be too big a hit at the core of family life.’
I.e., make all kids have an underachieving childhood just because some kids have underachieving childhoods. This is the sort of absurdity one reaches when one ranks social justice as a higher priority than a society’s advancement, stability, efficiency, and standard of living. Rather than simply admitting that other priorities outweigh social justice, SJWs contort logic to reach absurd conclusions.
Like advocating that families be restructured so as to not provide unfair advantages.
They do ramble on, don’t they.
‘What we realised we needed was a way of thinking about what it was we wanted to allow parents to do for their children
What you want to allow them to do? So presumptuous. Fuckers!
But okay…
Well, they’ll have to find a way to really destructively intervene in the parent-child relationship somehow. Because well-educated or otherwise successful people will absolutely supplement their child’s learning process at home (either by inadvertent example or overt instruction). So how exactly will it be feasible to prevent ‘elite private schooling’ from happening in reality?
Clearly, the children of educated people will have to be separated from their parents, and sent to group homes led by uneducated people.
Pretty soon stormtroopers will be knocking down your door because you helped your kid with their homework.
LauraW spotted the bit that I spotted. I love the notion of “we” allowing people to do stuff. You know, because of benevolence.
Oh, and if our concept of the family is rooted in religion rather than sociology (as is the case with myself), then I guess government will have to stamp out that pernicious bit of religion.